Sleep, an often hypocritical, false, accommodating, cowardly sleep,becomes nightmare, a nightmare thats often honest, loyal, brave, a nightmarethat operates without a safety net, but a nightmare in the end, and, whatsworse, a literary nightmare, literary suicide, a literary dead end. And yet with the passage of the years its fair to ask whether thenightmare, or the skin of the nightmare, is really as radical as its exponentsproclaimed. Many of them live much better than I do. In this sense, I can saythat Im an Apollonian rat and theyre starting to look more and more likeangora or Siamese cats neatly deflead by a collar labeled Acme or Dionysius,which at this point in history amounts to the same thing. Regrettably, Argentine literature today has three reference points.Two are public. The third is secret. All three are in some sense reactionsagainst Borges. All three ultimately represent a step backward and areconservative, not revolutionary, although all three, or at least two of them,have set themselves up as leftist alternatives. The first is the fiefdom of Osvaldo Soriano, who wasa good minor novelist. When it comes to Soriano, you have to have a brain fullof fecal matter to see him as someone around whom a literary movement can bebuilt. I dont mean hes bad. As Ive said: hes good, hes fun, hesessentially an author of crime novels or something vaguely like crime novels,whose main virtue praised at length by the always perceptive Spanish criticalestablishment is his sparing use of adjectives, a restraint lost, in any case,after his fourth or fifth book. Hardly the basis for a school. Apart fromSorianos kindness and generosity, which are said to be great, I suspect thathis sway is due to sales, to his accessibility, his mass readership, although tospeak of a mass readership when were really talking about twenty thousandpeople is clearly an exaggeration. What Argentine writers have learned fromSoriano is that they, too, can make money. No need to write original books, likeCortzar or Bioy, or total novels, like Cortzar or Marechal, or perfect stories, like Cortzar or Bioy, and noneed, especially, to squander your time and health in a lousy library whenyoure never going to win a Nobel Prize anyway. All you have to do is write likeSoriano. A little bit of humor, lots of Buenos Aires solidarity and camaraderie,a dash of tango, a worn-out boxer or two, an old but solid Marlowe. But,sobbing, I ask myself on my knees, solid where? Solid in heaven, solid in thetoilet of your literary agent? What kind of nobody are you, anyway? You have anagent? And an Argentine agent, no less? If the Argentine writer answers this last question in the affirmative,we can be sure that he wont write like Soriano but like Thomas Mann, like the Thomas Mann of Faust. Or, dizzied by thevastness of the pampa, like Goethe himself. The second line of descent is more complex. It begins with Roberto Arlt, though its likely that Arlt is totally innocentof this mess. Lets say, to put it modestly, that Arlt is Jesus Christ.Argentina is Israel, of course, and Buenos Aires is Jerusalem. Arlt is born andlives a rather short life, dying at forty-two, if Im not mistaken. Hes acontemporary of Borges. Borges is born in 1899 and Arlt in1900. But unlike Borges, Arlt grows up poor, and as an adolescent he goes towork instead of to Geneva. Arlts most frequently held job was as a reporter,ands in the light of the newspaper trade that one views many of his virtues,as well as his defects. Arlt is quick, bold, malleable, a born survivor, buthes also an autodidact, though not an autodidact in the sense that Borges was:Arlts apprenticeship proceeds in disorder and chaos, through the reading ofterrible translations, in the gutter rather than the library. Arlt is a Russian,a character out of Dostoyevsky, whereas Borges is anEnglishman, a character out of Chesterton or Shaw or Stevenson. Sometimes, despite himself, Borgeseven seems like a character out of Kipling. In the war betweenthe literary factions of Boedo and Florida, Arlt is with Boedo, although myimpression is that his thirst for battle was never excessive. His oeuvreconsists of two story collections and three novels, though in fact he wrote fournovels, and his uncollected stories, stories that appeared in newspapers andmagazines and that Arlt could write while he talked about women with his fellowreporters, would fill at least two more books. Hes also the author of a volumeof newspaper columns called Aguafuertes porteos [Etchings from BuenosAires], in the best French impressionist tradition, and Aguafuertesespaoles [Etchings from Spain], sketches of daily life in Spain in the1930s, which are full of gypsies, the poor, and the benevolent. He tried to getrich through deals that had nothing to do with the Argentine literature of theday, though they did have something to do with science fiction, and they werealways categorical failures. Then he died and, as he would have said, that wasthe end of everything. But it wasnt the end of everything, because like Jesus Christ, Arlthad his St. Paul. Arlts St. Paul, the founder of his church, is Ricardo Piglia. I often ask myself: What would have happened ifPiglia, instead of falling in love with Arlt, had fallen in love with Gombrowicz? Why didnt Piglia devote himself to spreading theGombrowiczian good news, or specialize in Juan Emar, theChilean writer who bears a marked resemblance to the monument to the unknownsoldier? A mystery. In any case, its Piglia who raises up Arlt in his owncoffin soaring over Buenos Aires, in a very Piglian or Arltian scene, though onethat takes place only in Piglias imagination, not in reality. It wasnt a cranethat lowered Arlts coffin. The stairs were wide enough for the job. The body inthe box wasnt a heavyweight champions. By this I dont mean to say that Arlt is a bad writer, becausein fact hes an excellent writer, nor do I mean to say that Piglia is a badwriter, because I think Piglia is one of the best Latin American novelistswriting today. The problem is, I find it hard to stand the nonsense thuggishnonsense, doomy nonsense that Piglia knits around Arlt, whos probably theonly innocent person in this whole business. I can in no way condone badtranslators of Russian, as Nabokov said to Edmund Wilson while mixing his third martini, and I cant acceptplagiarism as one of the arts. Seen as a closet or a basement, Arlts work isfine. Seen as the main room of the house, its a macabre joke. Seen as thekitchen, it promises food poisoning. Seen as the bathroom, itll end up givingus scabies. Seen as the library, its a guarantee of the destruction ofliterature. Or in other words: the literature of doom has to exist, but if nothingelse exists, its the end of literature. Like solipsistic literature so in vogue in Europe now that the youngHenry James is again roaming about at will a literatureof the I, of extreme subjectivity, of course must and should exist. But if allwriters were solipsists, literature would turn into the obligatory militaryservice of the mini-me or into a river of autobiographies, memoirs, journalsthat would soon become a cesspit, and then, again, literature would cease toexist. Because who really cares about the sentimental meanderings of aprofessor? Who can say, without lying through his teeth, that the daily routineof a dreary professor in Madrid, no matter how distinguished, is moreinteresting than the nightmares and dreams and ambitions of the celebrated andridiculous Carlos Argentino Daneri? No one with half a brain. Listen: I donthave anything against autobiographies, so long as the writer has a penis thatstwelve inches long when erect. So long as the writer is a woman who was once awhore and is moderately wealthy in her old age. So long as the author of thetome in question has lived a remarkable life. It goes without saying that if Ihad to choose between the solipsists and the bad boys of the literature of doomId take the latter. But only as a lesser evil. The third lineage in play in contemporary or post-Borgesian Argentineliterature is the one that begins with Osvaldo Lamborghini.This is the secret current. Its as secret as the life of Lamborghini, who diedin Barcelona in 1985, if Im not mistaken, and who left as literary executor hismost beloved disciple, Csar Aira, which is like a rat naming ahungry cat as executor. If Arlt, who as a writer is the best of the three, is the basement ofthe house that is Argentine literature, and Soriano is a vasein the guest room, Lamborghini is a little box on a shelf in the basement. Alittle cardboard box, covered in dust. And if you open the box, what you findinside is hell. Forgive me for being so melodramatic. I always have the sameproblem with Lamborghini. Theres no way to describe his work without fallinginto hyperbole. The word cruelty fits it like a glove.Harshness does too, but especially cruelty. Theunsuspecting reader may glimpse the sort of sadomasochistic game of writingworkshops that charitable souls with pedagogical inclinations organize in insaneasylums. Perhaps, but that doesnt go far enough. Lamborghini is always twosteps ahead of (or behind) his pursuers. Its strange to think about Lamborghini now. He died at forty-five,which means that Im four years older than he was then. Sometimes I pick up oneof his two books, edited by Aira which is only a figure of speech, since theymight just as well have been edited by the linotypist or by the doorman at hispublishing house in Barcelona, Serbal and I can hardly read it, not because Ithink its bad but because it scares me, especially all of Tadeys, anexcruciating novel, which I read (two or three pages at a time, not a page more)only when I feel especially brave. Few books can be said to smell of blood,spilled guts, bodily fluids, unpardonable acts. Today, when its so fashionable to talk about nihilists (althoughwhats usually meant by this is Islamic terrorists, who arent nihilists atall), it isnt a bad idea to take a look at the work of a real nihilist. Theproblem with Lamborghini is that he ended up in the wrong profession. He shouldhave gone to work as a hit man,stroy literature. Literature is anarmor-plated machine. It doesnt care about writers. Sometimes it doesnt evennotice they exist. Literatures enemy is something else, something much biggerand more powerful, that in the end will conquer it. But thats another story. Lamborghinis friends are fated to plagiarize him ad nauseam,something that might if he could see them vomit make Lamborghini himselfhappy. Theyre also fated to write badly, horribly, except forAira, who maintains a gray, uniform prose that, sometimes, when hes faithful toLamborghini, crystallizes into memorable works, like the story Cecil Taylor orthe novella How I Became a Nun, but that in its neo-avantgarde andRousselian (and utterly acritical) drift, is mostly just boring. Prose thatdevours itself without finding a way to move forward. Acriticism that translatesinto the acceptance qualified, of course of that tropical figure, theprofessional Latin American writer, who always has a word of praise for anyonewho asks for it. Of these three lineages the three strongest in Argentineliterature, the three departure points of the literature of doom Im afraidthat the one which will triumph is the one that most faithfully represents thesentimental rabble, in the words of Borges. The sentimental rabble is no longerthe Right (largely because the Right busies itself with publicity and the joysof cocaine and the plotting of currency devaluations and starvation, and inliterary matters is functionally illiterate or settles for reciting lines fromMartn Fierro) but the Left, and what the Left demands of itsintellectuals is soma, which is exactly what it receives from its masters. Soma,soma, soma Soriano, forgive me, yours is the kingdom. Arlt and Piglia are another story. Lets call theirsa love affair and leave them in peace. Both of them Arlt without a doubt arean important part of Argentine and Latin American literature, and their fate isto ride alone across the ghost-ridden pampa. But thats no basis for a school